lbrandy

You and I have both been here on HN nearing 20 years and you’ve been making this comment to that comment about bug bounties and the supposed black market value of exploits for the whole time. I suspect you’ll never run out of threads to correct. Thank you for your service.

> I've seen many cases where engineers optimize the sad path, but pessimize the wretched path.

As said GP, yes this is exactly what I meant and "happy-path" was an unclear choice of words. They optimize for the unhappy path on the good days, and make the bad days much worse.

Some anecdotes

1. People add retries w/o backoff. Now we have a retry storm.

2. People don't add jitter so we get huge waves of highly correlated retries that cause self-perpetuating overload cycles and failure.

3. People add retries (even w/ backoff) at more than one layer (e.g. one in process, one in envoy), so now we have a deeply confusing multi-level of retries with super weird n^2 patterns.

4. People find ways to fetch from multiple data sources to make a composite object but don't cache/reuse data they fetched, so one data source being down causes DOS on _other_ data sources because of retries.

5. People add failover mechanisms where all failures happily pick the same failover target because, ya know, it has the most free capacity.

6. People underestimate connection setup cost so "failover" causes huge increase in overall load due to connection setup (often tls setup) causing huge influx of "new" cpu work in a loaded system. CPU spike causes unhealthy destinations, causing more failovers, causing metastable failure.

7. People realize purely local decisions aren't optimal so add a layer of global health metrics (e.g. global retry budgets) but these systems add a time delay to the metric (ie its the view of the world 5ms ago). This delay makes their naive control algorithm go into oscillations or divergence spraying stuff everywhere.

All of these things have a similar pattern that when things are almost all good, they will make the system more robust. You'll get an extra 9 of reliability on good days. But they make everything far worse when things are bad.

I cannot even begin to express how many times I've seen engineers working super hard to optimize happy-paths so that we turn 3 nines of availability into 4 nines but introduce unintended emergent behaviors in unhappy-paths that turn 1 nine into zero nines via thundering herds, retry storms, etc.

NASDAQ index has a 3x float weighting (and a far, far smaller total capitalization) which makes it far more susceptible.

Other indexes do not have these multipliers, and are much larger. The exposure for e.g. VTI is far, far less.

You should not trust me, but here's my understanding. I wish there was a really good writeup somewhere to explain this authoritatively but I'm not sure there is one. Would also love to see one. Frankly vanguard should do it.

VTSAX (and VTI) follow the CRSP index. This is float-adjusted but they likely will be fast tracked (these are two separate rules in how this index chooses to weight things and participate in new stocks). At ~5% float, these companies will be in the 50-100B range. So under all those assumptions, they'll be bought quickly but represent less than 1% of VTSAX (until they float more shares on the public market).

There is a huge amount of misinformation on this topic, including in this thread, at the minute.

Some index funds have a very long horizon before they include them (e.g. a year). Others are "fast-tracked" (e.g. notably VTI). Most of those, however, are float-adjusted, so only the stock available for trade is considered part of the marketcap. So e.g. VTI / VTSAX will buy spacex relatively quickly after the IPO but at the float-adjusted weight of ~$75B because that's the % of stock available.

If you care alot about this, now is the time to understand how your index fund treats IPOs wrt to delays + float adjustment.

At least part of the answer is this doesn't meet the requirement of the proposed law. You need to actually provide the functionality of the server-side, not just its API.

> Anyway, I don't think that there's anything that it's like to be an LLM. I don't see how anybody who knows how they actually work could think that.

While I have almost zero belief that LLMs are conscious, I just don't think this is so trivially asserted.

The easy half of this is thinking that LLMs aren't conscious given what we know about how they work. The hard part (and very, very famously so) is explaining how _you_ are conscious given what we know about how you work. You can't ignore the second half of this problem when making statements like this... because many of the obvious ways to argue that clearly LLMs aren't conscious would also apply to you.

I have no idea how you can assert what is necessary/sufficient for consciousness in this way. Your comment reads like you believe you understand consciousness far more than I believe anyone actually does.

> My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling.

While I see what you are getting at, and I think its super important we come up with philosophical frameworks to push back on the central idea in question (ie, the moral hazard of "its gonna happen anyway so why not pour a little more into the river").... I think your writing/responses miss the central point.

As I see it, the fundamental issue with this essay, and your responses, is you keep conflating impossible with probability zero. People are saying "this is inevitable" to mean this has probability 1 of occurring, with basic game theory reasoning (its a giant iterative prisoners dilemna), and your response "but it's possible". Yes, with measure zero.

Telling us that such a path surely exists isn't useful. If you want to push back on "inevitability" you need to find a credible path with probability > 0 (which is not the same as impossible).

I was struck how the argument is also isomorphic to how we talked about computers and chess. We're at the stage where we are arguing the computer isn't _really_ understanding chess, though. It's just doing huge amounts of dumb computation with huge amounts of opening book and end tables and no real understanding, strategy or sense of whats going on.

Even though all the criticism were, in a sense, valid, in the end none of it amounted to a serious challenge to getting good at the task at hand.

> has a model much as we humans do

The premise that an AI needs to do Y "as we do" to be good at X because humans use Y to be good at X needs closer examination. This presumption seems to be omnipresent in these conversations and I find it so strange. Alpha Zero doesn't model chess "the way we do".

Suppose this is as good a place to pile-on as any.

Though this was not the post I was expecting to show up today, it was super awesome for me to get to have played my tiny part in this big journey. Thanks for everything @je (and qi + david -- and all the contributors before and after my time!).